[1] The reader who is interested in the matter may turn to letters
to Liszt of 1852. Here he speaks slightingly of Berlioz's _Cellini_,
and alludes to "the platitudes of his Faust _Symphony_(!)" The last
phrase alone is sufficient to show that Wagner was completely ignorant
of the work he had the impertinence to decry--for every one knows
that Berlioz's _Faust_ is not a symphony. In a recent article in _The
Speaker_ on "The Relations of Wagner and Berlioz," I have, I think,
shown that Wagner could not have known a note either of the _Faust_
or the _Cellini_; the dates of performance and of publication put
any such knowledge on his part out of the question. It is necessary,
however, to warn the reader that in both the English translation of the
Wagner-Liszt letters (by Dr. Hueffer, revised by Mr. Ashton Ellis),
and the big Glasenapp-Ellis _Life of Wagner_, the real facts are kept
from the English public. The incriminating phrase, "Faust Symphony," is
quietly abbreviated to "Faust," so that there is nothing to rouse the
reader's suspicions and make him look further into the matter. In the
big _Life_, again, now in course of publication, Mr. Ellis, though he
has thousands of pages at his disposal--though, indeed, he can devote a
whole volume of five hundred pages to two years of Wagner's life--still
cannot find room for the brief line or two from the 1852 letter that
would put the real facts before the reader; discreet and silent dots
take their place. The British public is apparently to be treated like a
child, and told only so much of the truth about Wagner as is thought to
be good for it--or at any rate good for Wagner.
[2] This is an error; he arrived in Paris in 1821.
[3] See Julien Tiersot's _Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps_
(1904)--an excellent book that is indispensable to every student of
Berlioz.
[4] It is interesting to note that Alfred de Musset anticipated Arthur
Rimbaud and the modern symbolists in having coloured audition. He once
maintained that the note F was yellow, G red, a soprano voice blond, a
contralto voice brown. See Arvède Barine's _Alfred de Musset_ (in _Les
Grands Écrivains Français_), p. 115.
[5] Hoffmann was, of course, a musician as well; but he is more truly
the novelist who wrote about music than the musician who wrote fiction.
[6] Buckle (note 316 to Chap. VII. of the _History of Civilisation_)
remarks that "All great revolutions have a direct tendency to increase
insanity, as long as they last, and probably for some time afterwards;
but in this as in other respects the French Revolution stands alone in
the number of its victims." See the references he gives, bearing upon
"the horrible but curious subject of madness caused by the excitement
of the events which occurred in France late in the eighteenth century."
Buckle speaks only of the Revolution, but of course the subsequent wars
must have operated in much the same way.
[7] Chateaubriand, _Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse_, p. 2.
[8] In his letter of March 18, 1839, he gives Ernest Chevalier the plan
of a work that is curiously like that of Berlioz mentioned on page 38,
in its preposterous fantasies and its over-emphasis of form and colour.
[9] He puts the same rhodomontade into the mouth of his Lélio.
[10] One or two of these dates can only be looked upon as
approximative, but if wrong at all, they are so only to the extent of a
year or two, which does not affect the question.
[11] It appears from the Sayn-Wittgenstein letters that the beautiful
theme of the love-scene in _Roméo et Juliette_ was inspired by the
youthful love for Estelle that also produced the opening theme of the
_Symphonie fantastique_. It must, therefore, have been quite a boyish
invention, though no doubt its development and general treatment really
belong to 1838.
[12] M. Julien Tiersot, in his admirable _Berlioz et la société de son
temps_, divides the life of Berlioz into five epochs--1803-1827 (his
childhood, youth, and apprenticeship), 1827-1842 (the epoch of his
greatest activity), 1843-1854 (in which he does little except _Faust_,
which in reality, perhaps, dates from an earlier time), 1854-1865
(the epoch of _L'Enfance du Christ_, _Béatrice et Benedict_, and _Les
Troyens_), and 1865-1869 (barren of works). The discussion in the text
will make it clear why I have substituted my own classification for
that of M. Tiersot, and will, I hope, be convincing. One other point
deserves noting. Towards the end of his _Mémoires_ Berlioz tells us
that he had dreamed a symphony one night, but deliberately refrained
from writing it because of the expense of producing and printing it.
Such a reason may have weighed a little with him; but no one who knows
anything of artistic psychology can regard it as the total explanation.
If the dream-work had really sunk into Berlioz's soul and he had felt
that he had full command of it, he could not have rested until he had
it down on paper, if only for his own gratification. It is far more
probable that he felt himself unequal to the mental strain of thinking
out his vision and forcing the stubborn material into a plastic piece
of art. There was, I take it, a lassitude of tissue in him at this time
that made protracted musical thinking a burden to him.
[13] On the whole question see the chapter on "Le Tempérament" in
Edmond Hippeau's _Berlioz Intime_.
[14] The date of _Lélio_ is 1831-1832, but the most absurd thing in it,
the _Chanson de brigands_, was written in January 1830--at the same
epoch, therefore, as the _Symphonie fantastique_. It is fairly clear
that 1829-1830 marked the climax of Berlioz's eccentricity, and that
his passion for Henrietta Smithson had much to do with it.
[15] Jullien (p. 241) says "it was about this time that the neuralgia
_to which he had always been subject_ settled in the intestines...."
[16] He himself describes it as "a caprice written with the point of a
needle, and demanding excessive delicacy of execution." Yet this is the
man for whom the world can find only the one epithet of "extravagant"!
_To MRS. ROSA NEWMARCH_
"FAUST" IN MUSIC
The musical settings of _Faust_, in one form or another, now number, I
believe, something like thirty or thirty-five. It is perhaps the most
popular of all subjects with musicians, far outdistancing in favour
the Hamlets and Othellos and Romeo-and-Juliets and all the other
lay figures which composers are fond of using to show off their own
garments. It cannot be said that they have added very much, on the
whole, to our comprehension of the drama; indeed, with half-a-dozen
exceptions the Faust-symphonies and Faust-operas and Faust-scenes have
quite failed to justify their existence. One of the main difficulties
in the way of the musician--even supposing him to have the brain
capacity to rise to the height of the psychology of the thing--is the
enormous range and wealth of material of the drama itself. The First
Part of Goethe's work alone, or the Second Part, is quite sufficient
to tax the constructive powers of any composer to the uttermost; but
to reshape the whole of _Faust_ in music is a desperate undertaking.
Since Goethe's day we are bound to see the Faust picture through _his_
eyes; any harking back to earlier forms of it is quite out of the
question. And Goethe, while he has enormously extended and deepened
the spiritual elements of the story, has by this very means set the
musician a problem of discouraging difficulty. No musical version
of the play, in the first place, can be adequate unless it embraces
Goethe's Second Part as well as the First. Due opportunity, again, must
be given for the exposition of all the essential, the seminal "motives"
of the drama, and they are many indeed. The composer is thus on the
horns of a dilemma. If he wants his work to stand in the same gallery
with Goethe's, he has to run a line through Faust's soul long enough
and sinuous enough to touch upon all its secret places; but any one who
tries to do this soon perceives how hard it is to focus so vast a scene
and to keep the picture within one frame of reasonable size. An opera
or a symphony that should attempt to cover all the psychological ground
of the drama would take at least ten or twelve hours in performance.
Apparently the only rational course for the future composer who may
think of setting the Faust subject is to take two or three evenings
over it, after the manner of Wagner's _Ring of the Nibelung_; and until
this is done we shall have to rest satisfied with the more or less
inadequate versions we have at present.
The cosmic quality of the subject, one would think, should have
attracted more of the first-rank men, considering how many of the
second and third rank it has tempted to self-destruction. One wonders,
for example, why it should have fallen to the lot of Gounod to give so
many honest but uninstructed people their first, perhaps their only,
idea of _Faust_--an experience something like getting one's first
notions of _Hamlet_ from the country booth. We can understand their
taking the thing seriously, for I fancy we all took it seriously at
one time--in the callow stage of our musical culture--and many quite
respectable musicians do so still. Yet we have only to come back to
it one day, after dropping acquaintance with it for many years, to
see what a laughter-moving monstrosity the thing is. The book gets
as near the inane at times as anything founded on Goethe could do,
though the music has its good points, of course. In the overture and
opening scene there really is some suggestion of the gravity and
the spirituality of the problems of Faust's soul; but from the time
Margaret and Mephistopheles appear upon the scene the thing becomes for
the most part mere opera, and Faust just the ordinary amorist--_l'homme
moyen sensuel_. The melodrama, _quâ_ melodrama, is sometimes good of
its kind; the Valentine scenes generally ring true, and now and then
they become really impressive. There is plenty of lovely music, too,
in the opera, which may suffice you if you are not very critical as
to the poetic basis--if you do not attempt, that is, to get below the
ear-tickling sounds and to see the characters as Goethe has drawn them.
But once you begin to think of these matters you can only smile at
Gounod and his fellow-criminals who concocted the libretto.
Look at the Gounod overture, for example. For a couple of minutes it
is worthy of almost the loftiest subject or of the best man who has
taken up the _Faust_ theme; and then how woefully it fizzles out,
drifting back into its native habitat of banality, where the air is
more congenial to it--for all the world like a man who goes to an Ibsen
play, sternly resolved to be a serious moralist for one evening at
least, but at the end of the first act makes for the nearest music-hall
or _café chantant_. One can see where it is all tending; Faust the
philosopher has already, at this early stage of his career, become
Faust the _boulevardier_. So with the opening scene, wherein we just
catch the accent of Goethe for a breath or two, but never longer. And
then that absurd devil Mephistopheles, with his stage strut, his stage
idiom, his stage brain! "Are you afraid?" he asks Faust at his first
red-fire appearance, when "Are you amused?" would be more appropriate.
There is a touch of the genuine sardonic quality in his serenade;
but on the whole he suggests not so much the spirit of denial as the
spirit of the pantomime rally. Nor, till you quietly think about the
structure of the libretto, do you realise how exceedingly funny it all
is. In the drinking-scene it is Wagner who gets up to sing the song of
the rat; Wagner! who by no process of shuffling of names can be got
out of our heads as the pupil and companion of Faust. It is true he
does not go very far with the ballad, Mephistopheles interrupting him
after the first line or two--for which Gounod, remembering that Berlioz
had set the same song once for all--was no doubt duly grateful to the
devil. Then Mephistopheles sings his fatuous air about the Calf of
Gold, and quarrels with Valentine--who, oddly enough, is also of the
party--about his sister. So the opera goes on--very charming where it
has least to do with the subject, but merely feeble or ludicrous when
it comes near enough to Goethe to suggest a comparison. For Gounod,
whose own religion was merely Catholicism _sucré_, not only lacked the
brain to grasp the austere philosophy of a subject of this kind; his
musical faculty was not deep enough nor strong enough to save him from
aiming perpetually at drama and achieving only melodrama. Watch him,
for example, in the scenes where he is trying to carry on a dramatic
dialogue, and see to what straits he is put in the effort to make the
orchestra do something expressive in between the actors' speeches. See
the catchpenny trade he drives in those stale operatic formulas for
whose poetic equivalent we have to go to the country booth; see him
capering about with his fussy little runs and twiddles, and striking
all kinds of pompous musical poses, that really signify nothing at all,
and only remind us of the conventional up-down-right-left-cut-thrust
of stage-fencing. And this banal thing, this cheap vulgarisation of
Goethe, this blend of the pantomime, the novelette and the Christmas
card, still represents _Faust_ in the minds of nine musical amateurs
out of ten! It is no more the real Faust than Sardou's _Robespierre_,
for example, is the real Robespierre; in each case a portentous name
has simply been tacked on to a piece of very ordinary melodrama. The
most pleasing elements in Gounod's work--the really lovely, if not
always profound, love-music--are precisely those that withdraw it
furthest from Goethe; for here it is clearly not Faust speaking to
Margaret, but any man to any woman, any Edwin to any Angelina. Gounod's
Margaret alone suggests dimly the drama of Goethe; but that is because
she is the easiest of all the characters to represent in music. In
most of the settings of _Faust_, indeed, the portrait of Margaret
carries a kind of conviction even when the other two characters have
nothing more in common with Faust and Mephistopheles than the names.
He must be a very inferior musician who could fail here. The essence
of Margaret's character is simplicity, innocence, the absence of all
complicating elements; and accordingly we find that all the settings
of her have a strong family resemblance to each other. Schumann's
Margaret is very German, Liszt's very German but at the same time quite
cosmopolitan, Berlioz's curiously _moyen-âge_, Gounod's decidedly
modern and town-bred, but all have the same fundamental qualities; none
does violence to our conception of the real Margaret. Faust, however,
has to be something more than the seducer of Margaret; we want to see
some traces in his music of the weariness of life, the disgust with
knowledge, that distinguish him at the beginning of the drama; we
want to see him growing at once stronger and weaker as he develops,
his character being purged of its dross, his soul's insight into the
world of real things becoming prophetically clear just as he is bidden
to leave it. Unless some elements at least of this picture are given
us, the composer has no right to attach to his painting the title of
_Faust_.
One wonders, again, why a musician like Boïto should ever have thought
himself fit company for Marlowe and Goethe. Here is a poet--one
can cheerfully pay a tribute to his general culture if not to his
musicianship--with a semi-musical gift that rarely rises above the
mediocre and generally dips a point or two below it, who not only
fancies he can throw new light on Faust's soul through his music, but
serenely undertakes a reconstruction of the drama that Goethe gave him.
Boïto made such a really good libretto for Verdi out of _Othello_ that
it is rather surprising what an abject mess he has made of _Faust_.
His hash of the great drama is really deplorable. His superior culture
and his finer literary palate put him above the commonplace Gounod
conception of the play as a melodramatic story of a man, a maid, and
a devil. He knows there is a "problem," a "world-view," in it that
really makes it what it is. But as soon as he begins to set the play
to music he seems to forget what the problem is, where it begins and
where it ends. The result is that he is not content to write a piece of
plain, straightforward music of the ordinary operatic type, but must
needs drag in just enough of Goethe's great plan to make the whole
thing preposterous. I say nothing of his musical deficiencies--of his
incurable old-Italian-opera tricks of style, his lame, blind, and
halt melody, the monotonous tenuity of his harmony, the odd jumble
of Wagner and Rossini in his idiom, his notion that the terrible is
adequately expressed in five-finger exercises, and the horrible by a
reproduction of the noises made when the bow is drawn across all four
strings of the violin at once. These are mere details, as is also the
fact that his powers of dramatic characterisation are very limited,
or that his choruses of angels would be more suitable to _contadini_,
or that his Mephistopheles is transported bodily and mentally from
the _buffo_ stage. What is most awesome in Boïto's opera is the
pseudo-philosophical scheme of the libretto. He begins with a Prologue
in Heaven that is almost entirely superfluous, not one-fifth of it
being concerned with Faust. The first half of the first Act might also
be dispensed with entirely, for all it has to do with the problem
of Faust's soul. The second half of this Act, and the first half of
the next, are, in the main, essential to the drama, though there is
no need for musical composers to retain, in the garden scene, the
episodes between Mephistopheles and Martha, that are right enough in
the play, but mar the more ideal atmosphere of music. The descent into
the _buffo_ is perilously easy here; and it is much better to omit all
this, as Schumann does, and concentrate the whole of the light on Faust
and Margaret.
Boïto's next scene, however--the Walpurgis night--is pure waste of
time and space; there is a great deal too much of Mephistopheles and
the chorus, and not half enough of Faust to let us grasp the bearing
of the scene upon the evolution of his soul. The whole of the third
Act helps to carry on the story; but the fourth Act--the Classical
Walpurgis Night--becomes pure nonsense in Boïto's handling of it.
Whatever meaning there may be in the Helena episode in Goethe's long
allegory, there can be no sense at all in simply pushing her on the
operatic stage in order to sing a duet with Faust, the pair having
incontinently fallen in love at first sight--presumably behind the
scenes. Finally, the Epilogue--the Death of Faust--ends the work only
in an operatic, not a spiritual, sense; there being no spiritual
connection between the earlier and the later Faust, no reason why he
should die just then, no hint of the bearing of his death upon his
life. And why in the name of common sense should Boïto have permitted
himself to rewrite the final Act, the crowning pinnacle of the whole
mighty structure that Goethe has so slowly, so painfully reared? In
place of the great motives and profoundly moving scenes of the poetic
drama--Faust's schemes for human happiness, the poor old couple and
their little house on the shore, the conversation with the four gray
women, the blinding and death of Faust, the coming of Mephistopheles
with the Lemures to dig the grave, the pathetic death-scene, the
transportation of the purified Faust into that diviner air where
he meets the purified Margaret--instead of all this we have Faust
back again in the old laboratory of the first Act, Mephistopheles
holding out banal operatic temptations to him, after the manner
of Gounod, and Faust clinging for salvation to the Bible and going
straight off to heaven on his knees, all in the most approved fashion
of the Stratford-on-Avon novelette.[17] Yet, bad as it is, Boïto's
_Mefistofele_ is not the worst that might be done with the drama. His
musical faculties may be of the kind that move us to more laughter
than is good for us; but he certainly had some understanding of the
inner spirit as well as of the external action of Goethe's poem; and
the very extent of his failure serves to show how difficult it is to
mould the play to musical requirements. The difficulty lies not so
much in finding appropriate musical episodes as in dealing with such a
multiplicity of them as there is. The drama, indeed, is amazingly rich
in musical "stuff"--as Wagner would have put it--of the first order;
as Berlioz expressed it in connection with Gounod's _Faust_, "the
librettists have passed over some admirably musical situations that it
would have been necessary to invent if Goethe had not already done so."
There is a vast quantity of the poem, of course, that is as alien to
the spirit of music as it is to that of literature. But there is a
certain irreducible minimum that _must_ be dealt with, if the musical
setting is to aim at reproducing the spiritual problem of Goethe with
anything like completeness. The Prelude and the Prologue in Heaven may,
in case of need, be dispensed with; but almost all the First Part ought
to be utilised, not following Goethe word for word, of course, but
taking the pith of each scene. Here and there we come across sections
that either defy musical treatment or are comparatively unimportant
episodes in the poem. But the main psychological moments must all be
dealt with; and the omission of any one of these cuts a piece out of
the intellectual interest, breaks the subtle line of development,
and makes all that comes after it seem insufficiently led up to. The
First Part of Goethe's _Faust_, in fact, is in itself a masterpiece of
construction, holding the balance most carefully and skilfully between
dramatic action and philosophical reflection. Omit any of the steps by
which the characters have been brought to the dramatic completeness in
which we see them at the end of the First Part, and you break the spell
that makes them real to us.
There is, then, in the First Part alone, more than enough to constitute
the poetical material of at least two operas. Many composers have
chosen to end their labours here, with the death of Margaret and the
flight of Mephistopheles with Faust; and from the purely operatic point
of view there is much to be said for such a course. The First Part does
at least run on the lines that are common to a philosophical drama and
an opera; whereas the Second Part deliberately flouts the musical sense
at point after point. In the First Part the poetry marches hand-in-hand
with the ethical conception; in the Second Part the poetry has often
to be dug out of the jungle of prosaic diffuseness in which Goethe has
hidden it. Nevertheless one great purpose runs like a fine, continuous
thread through all the seemingly unrelated incidents of the drama; and
this line at least must be followed by the musician, though he may
disregard the excursions from its direct course which Goethe so often
permits himself. The poet's purpose, of course, was not complete,
could not possibly be complete, without the Second Part. From the
very beginning we feel that the vast issues must end, full-orbed, in
something like the remote, non-earthly atmosphere of the opening; and
we keep in our memory the words of the Prologue in Heaven--
"A good man, through obscurest aspiration,
Has still an instinct of the one true way"--
waiting for the ultimate gleam that shall make the darkness of Faust's
first perplexed flight quite clear to us. Plainly one-half only of the
problem had been stated in the First Part; and though comparatively
few people read the Second Part, and few of those who have read it
once read it twice, it is really the rounding-off of the philosophical
conception here that gives the First Part its proper meaning. The
human striving of the earlier poem demanded the later episodes, both
as poetical completion and ethical solution. Without the Second Part,
the First Part is a broken cadence, a discord only half resolved.
Goethe himself, we are told, "compared the Prologue in Heaven to the
overture to Mozart's _Don Giovanni_, in which a certain musical phrase
occurs which is not repeated until the finale." A musical setting can
be adequate only if it really deals with the central spiritual forces
of _Faust_, not only as they affect the protagonist up to the death of
Margaret, but in the crowded after-years. Life was wider than art to
Goethe; and the vastness and unwieldiness of the scheme of the play
are mostly due to his attempt to embrace so much of life in it. The
trouble with the average musical setting is that it fails to rise to
the level of Goethe's own lofty humanism. The theatrical is there in
plenty; but there is little that brings home to us the grave philosophy
of the drama, little that speaks of that great, moving, human figure of
the Second Part, beating his way painfully through the darkness to the
light. Above all, one cannot spare the ethical elevation of that final
scene, with its supremely pathetic picture of the man's defeat in the
very moment of victory, and its mystical suggestion of this material
defeat being in reality a spiritual triumph. Goethe, in fact, made the
subject an essentially modern one--put into it the fever and the fret,
the finer joys and finer despairs, the deepened philosophy and the more
impassioned spiritual aspirations, of the generations that succeeded
the great upheaval of the eighteenth century. In Marlowe's _Faustus_ we
feel that, powerful as the wings of the poet are, there still clings to
them something of the grossness of the Middle Ages, and the grossness,
only more superficially refined, of the Renaissance. The thick breath
of materiality hangs like a cloud over Marlowe's drama. Faustus himself
has in him much of the coarseness of tissue of the Elizabethan age.
On the purely human side, especially in the later scenes, he does
indeed touch and move us; but in the mainsprings of his being, in the
limitations of his desire--
"Sweet Mephistopheles, thou pleasest me;
Whilst I am here on earth, let me be cloyed
With all things that delight the heart of man.
My four-and-twenty years of liberty
I'll spend in pleasure and in dalliance,
That Faustus' name, whilst this bright frame doth stand,
May be admired through the furthest land"--
how immeasurably does he fall short of the philosophic Faust of Goethe--
"Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces."
The mere magic-working Mephistopheles of Marlowe, again, takes on, in
the modern poet, something of the terrifying grandeur of one of the
essential forces of the universe. How subtle is Goethe's insight into
him, and how one longs to get something of that subtlety in his music--
"Part of that Power, not always understood,
Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good."
------------------------------------
"Part of the Part am I, once all, in primal Night--
Part of the Darkness which brought forth the Light,
The haughty Light, which now disputes the space,
And claims of Mother Night her ancient place."
He is the element of destruction that is the other half of being; not
a mere tempting devil, the crude beguiler of the theological fancy,
but simply the evil side of Faust becoming self-conscious. See, for
example, in the eleventh scene of the First Part, and again in the
fourteenth scene, how he probes to the very depth of Faust's soul,
dragging into the light the true motives that sway him, which Faust
himself is incompetent to analyse. His taunt in the seventeenth scene,
again, "Thou, full of sensual, super-sensual desire," is a stroke of
which Marlowe was incapable.
There are one or two scenes in the Second Part which lend themselves
to music, but have been curiously neglected--it being strange, for
example, that no musician of the first rank has set the scene of
Faust's discovery of ideal beauty (Act i., Scene 7). But on the whole
the Second Part is uncongenial to music, until we come to the gravely
passionate human element at the end. Even to poetry Goethe's plan
is somewhat unpropitious, as Schiller pointed out to him. "A source
of anxiety to me," he wrote in 1797, "is that _Faust_, according to
your design, seems to require such a great amount of material, if
the idea is finally to appear complete; and I find no poetical hoop
which can encircle such a cumulative mass.... For example, Faust must
necessarily, to my thinking, be conducted into the active life of the
world, and whatever part of it you may choose out of the great whole,
the very nature of it seems to require too much particularity and
diffuseness." If the "poetical hoop" was so hard to find, a musical
hoop to contain such wildly-mixed material is beyond the power of man
to cast. All the musician can do is to make sure of the final scenes
(from Act vii. Scene 4 onwards); though even then--and this is the
perpetual dilemma--one feels the need of some connecting link between
the Faust whose life is drawing so near to the end, and the Faust
whom we saw being torn away by Mephistopheles from Margaret and the
prison. As Schiller said, Faust must go "into the active life of the
world" before that stupendous cadence can have its true significance;
yet most of the intermediate scenes into which Goethe has put him can
never be caught up into the being of music. As one looks at the poem
itself, one admits despairingly that it would be impossible to build
the first four Acts into any operatic structure. But one broad purpose
of spiritual development runs through even this desert of apparently
endless aridity; and surely this might be treated by the musician, if
not in operatic, at least in symphonic form. That is, between the stage
of Faust's life that ends with the death of Margaret and the awakening
of Faust to a new joy in earth and a resolution to seek the highest
good, and the stage where his own death puts the seal on the drama, we
might have a symphonic interlude that would make the transition less
abrupt for us. The comparative vagueness of the music in this form
would match the increased indefiniteness of the poetical handling;
while the more positive operatic form could be resumed in the Fifth
Act, where the closeness of the association with actual life demands
the continuous use of words. It is not an ideal device, perhaps, but it
is the only adequate one. Only in some such manner as this can we hope
to get the real _Faust_ translated into music. As it is, the composers
who have grasped the philosophy of the work have been restricted to a
canvas far too small for the whole subject, while those who have not
laid stress on the philosophy have simply not dealt with the Faust
drama at all.
Men like Wagner and Rubinstein, again, who have really had the
thinker's appreciation of the deeper currents of the theme, and have
tried to express these in the single-movement form, have been woefully
hampered by the limited space in which they have been compelled
to work. Wagner, of course, never meant his _Faust Overture_ to be
a complete treatment of the subject; it was intended merely as one
section of a large Faust Symphony. The general excellence and the one
defect of the work inspire us with regret that the scheme as a whole
was never carried out. Its one shortcoming is that it deals only with
the melancholy, brooding, world-weary Faust of the opening of Goethe's
poem, the egoistic Faust on whom the larger world-issues have not yet
dawned. We should like to have had Wagner's treatment of the final and
complete Faust, taken out of himself, touched with sublimer sorrows
and compassions, pouring out his soul upon the greater interests of
humanity. As it is, however, we have in the _Faust Overture_ the
veritable Faust of the opening of Goethe's poem. No attempt is made
at the portraiture of Margaret--the beautiful theme in the middle
section simply representing the "ever-womanly" floating before Faust's
eye in vague suggestion--nor is there any Mephistopheles in the work.
But in regard to the special task Wagner seems to have set himself,
the translation into music of the first scene of Goethe's First Part,
nothing more perfect could well be imagined. There are few more
convincing pieces of musical portraiture than this great grey head,
with the look of the weary Titan in the eyes, that looms out in heroic
proportions from Wagner's score.
One of the least known of the settings of _Faust_--or at any rate of
the fine settings of it--is that of Henri Hugo Pierson.[18] Though
he was an Englishman, his music is practically unknown in England,
for which his residence in Germany is no doubt mainly responsible.
It is a pity such a man could not have found in his own country the
conditions under which his talents could thrive and expand; for when
one realises how much strength and originality there is in his music,
one feels that had he worked in England he might have helped to found
a native school, and so brought our musical Renaissance to birth at
any rate a generation earlier than it has come. His music is always
that of a musician who is at the same time poet and thinker. The very
plan of his _Faust_ is original. As its title indicates, it deals only
with the Second Part of Goethe's play. This in itself is a slight
fault, for it brings before us that tremendous drama of regeneration
without having prepared us for it by the previous drama of struggle and
error. Starting with Ariel and the Chorus of Fairies singing round the
sleeping Faust, Pierson takes us through the scene in the Emperor's
Castle, the calling up of the apparitions of Paris and Helena, and the
attempt of Faust to seize the Grecian beauty--all from Act i. From
the second Act we have Wagner and the birth of the Homunculus, and
the journey of Faust, Mephistopheles, and the Homunculus through
the air. From the third Act we have the scene before the Palace of
Menelaus (Helen and the Chorus of captive Trojan women), the coming of
Faust as a knight of the Middle Ages, his dialogue with Helena, the
appearance and death of Euphorion; from the fourth Act, the battle
between the Emperor and his enemies; from the fifth Act, the song of
Lynceus the warder, the entry of the four Grey Women--Want, Guilt,
Care, and Need--and the blinding of Faust; the digging of the grave by
the Lemures, the death of Faust, the choruses of the spirits and the
anchorites, the chorus of the younger seraphs and angels ascending with
the spirit of Faust, the scene in the empyrean, and the final "Chorus
Mysticus"--_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss_.
The scheme, it will be seen at once, is not an ideal one. It achieves
comprehensiveness at the expense of organic unity. It keeps too
strictly to the letter and the order of Goethe's scenes; episodes like
the battle, that are of the very slightest significance, are needlessly
included; other and more essential episodes are so lightly dwelt upon
that their full value can hardly be brought out; and others are omitted
altogether. As a mere piece of architecture the thing is extremely
imperfect. Too much use, again, is made of the melodrama--_i.e._ the
union of the reciting voice with the orchestra--one of the least
justifiable and most trying forms of art ever invented. But with all
its faults of structure it is a notable work; the music redeems
all its errors. The opening scene, with Ariel and the spirits, is
exquisitely fresh and sunny; the death of Euphorion and the death of
Faust are both very moving, and there are some fine choruses in the
work, notably the "Heilige Poesie." Pierson re-creates for us the
philosophic atmosphere of the Second Part of _Faust_, and gives us
the same impression of the largeness of the issues at work; which is
no small achievement. It is a pity one of our Festival Committees
could not be prevailed upon to let us hear the score, or at any rate a
portion of it.
Unduly neglected, again, is Henry Litolff's setting of certain scenes
from Goethe (op. 103). Like Pierson, he adopts occasionally the
unpleasant form of declamation with orchestral accompaniment. This
spoils an otherwise fine treatment of the first scene (in Faust's
study). It is really a symphonic poem with a vocal element here
and there; and paradoxically enough, though Faust is restricted to
declamation, the Earth-Spirit sings his part to a melodic and very
expressive _quasi recitativo_. The movement has the prevailing fault
of all Litolff's writing--a certain slackness and want of resource in
the development; but the ideas themselves are often most striking.
The first scene concludes with a fine setting of the Easter Hymn. The
second scene, before the City Gate, is exceedingly fresh and charming;
while the seventh, the scene in the Cathedral (No. 20 of Goethe's First
Part) is a masterly piece of work--finer even, perhaps, than Schumann's
version of the same scene. If Goethe's drama has moved many of the
second-rate musicians only to show how very second-rate they are, it
has at all events stimulated others to efforts that at times put them
very nearly in the ranks of the first-rate.
Rubinstein's orchestral poem _Faust_--which the composer styles
simply "Ein musikalisches Charakterbild"--is not altogether easy to
understand, in its literary intentions, in the absence of a guide.
It is in one movement only, and contains apparently no allusion to
Mephistopheles, nor, as far as can be gathered beyond doubt from the
music itself, to Margaret--for the suave melodies that are interposed
as a contrast to the more passionate and more reflective utterances of
Faust are not distinctively feminine in nature. They may have nothing
at all to do with Margaret, or they may represent Faust's attempt to
resolve his philosophic doubts by a contemplation of the simpler and
more constant elements of human nature--just as Wagner, in his _Faust
Overture_, does not so much limn an actual Margaret as suggest the
consolation which the thought of womanly love can bring to the soul
of Faust. Rubinstein's work, though not quite on the same plane as
Wagner's, is yet exceedingly sincere. What it lacks is sufficient
definiteness to make us refer it to Faust and to Faust only. It is
clearly a strenuous picture of a lofty and noble soul, striving in
its own way to read "the riddle of the painful earth," and mournfully
acknowledging, at the last, that its only portion is defeat and
disillusion. But this is a psychological frame that might be made to
fit a score of pictures; and one misses, in Rubinstein's piece, the
conclusive sense of congruence with Faust as we know him in Goethe's
poem. There is nothing in it to clash with the poet's conception; the
emotional atmosphere is the same in both; but in spite of the title
the musician has put upon his work, it is less a study of individual
character than a description of a type. Rubinstein's Faust is the least
definite and the most symbolical of them all.
Rubinstein's tone-poem and every other purely orchestral setting of
the subject, however, pale before the magnificence of Liszt's _Faust
Symphony_. Liszt writes three movements--entitled respectively "Faust,"
"Margaret," "Mephistopheles"--and then sums up the whole work in a
choral setting of Goethe's final lines, "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein
Gleichniss," etc. Here the larger scale on which the picture is painted
permits Liszt both a breadth and an intimacy of psychology which are
impossible in the one-movement overtures. In the long first movement
(taking about twenty-five minutes in performance), we really do feel
that Faust is being analysed with something of the same elaboration
and the same insight as in Goethe's poem. The handling is a trifle
loose here and there, owing to Liszt repeating his material from time
to time in obedience to literary rather than to musical necessities;
but apart from this the "Faust" movement is extraordinarily fine
character-drawing, and certainly the only instrumental Faust study
that strikes one as being complete. In the "Margaret" movement he
incorporates very suggestively a reference here and there to the
phrases of the "Faust," thus not only sketching Margaret herself but
giving the love-scenes in a form of the highest concentration. This
section is surpassingly beautiful throughout; in face of this divine
piece of music alone the present neglect of Liszt's work in England
is something inexplicable. Almost the whole Margaret is there, with
her curious blend of sweetness, timidity, and passion; while Faust's
interpositions are exceedingly noble. All that one misses in Liszt,
I think, is the tragic Margaret of the scene in the Cathedral and
the prayer to the Mater Dolorosa. The "Mephistopheles" section is
particularly ingenious. It consists, for the most part, of a kind of
burlesque upon the subjects of the "Faust," which are here passed, as
it were, through a continuous fire of irony and ridicule. This is a far
more effective way of depicting "the spirit of denial" than making him
mouth a farrago of pantomime bombast, in the manner of Boïto. The being
who exists, for the purposes of the drama, only in antagonism to Faust,
whose main activity consists only in endeavouring to frustrate every
good impulse of Faust's soul, is really best dealt with, in music,
not as a positive individuality, but as the embodiment of negation--a
malicious, saturnine parody of all the good that has gone to the making
of Faust. The "Mephistopheles" is not only a piece of diabolically
clever music, but the best picture we have of a character that in the
hands of the average musician becomes either stupid, or vulgar, or
both. As we listen to Liszt's music, we feel that we really have the
Mephistopheles of Goethe's drama.
The Mephistopheles of Berlioz's _Faust_ is interesting in another way.
Berlioz, of course, played fast and loose in the most serene way with
the drama as a whole, accepting, rejecting, or altering it just as it
suited his musical scheme. He blandly avows, for example, that he takes
Faust, in one scene, into Hungary, simply because he wants to insert
in the score his arrangement of a celebrated Hungarian march! Moral
criticism would be wasted on one so naked and unashamed as this--though
perhaps after all it is only pedantry that would regard most of
Berlioz's alterations of Goethe's drama as very serious perversions of
the main Faust legend. So long as the central problems of the character
are seen and stated, it matters very little through what incidents the
composer chooses to bring them home to us. And Berlioz really has a
very strong grip upon the inner meaning of the legend. His success,
indeed, is somewhat surprising when we consider how he approached
the work. He had been greatly impressed, in his youth, by Gérard de
Nerval's translation of Goethe's poem; but instead of attempting a
continuous setting of the work at this time (1829), he aimed only at
setting eight disconnected scenes. These were (1) "The Easter Scene";
(2) "The Peasants' Dance"; (3) "The Chorus of Sylphs"; (4) "The Song
of the Rat"; (5) "The Song of the Flea"; (6) "The Ballad of the King
of Thule"; (7) "Margaret's Romance and the Soldiers' Chorus"; (8)
"Mephistopheles' Serenade." Faust, therefore, had practically no part
in this selection; and it was not till seventeen years later that
Berlioz brought out his complete "dramatic legend." It looks as if his
early interest in the work were more pictorial than philosophical, for
the two songs of Margaret alone suggest the deeper emotional currents
of the drama. Mephistopheles, however, seems to have captivated his
young Romantic imagination from the first, and, in the ironic serenade
to Margaret, the character as he conceived it is already fully
sketched. Berlioz's devil is, perhaps, the only operatic Mephistopheles
that carries anything like conviction; he never, even for a moment,
suggests the inanely grotesque figure of the pantomime. Of malicious,
saturnine devilry there is plenty in him; no one, except Liszt, could
compete with Berlioz on this ground. But there is more than this in the
character. In such scenes as that on the banks of the Elbe, where he
lulls Faust to sleep, there is a real suggestion of power, of dominion
over ordinary things, that takes Mephistopheles out of the category of
the merely theatrical and puts him in that of the philosophical.
Nor, in sheer character-drawing, can any other operatic Faust and
Margaret compare with the figures of Berlioz; and when we consider the
piecemeal manner in which the work was built up, it is astonishing
how just, how sure, how incisive this portraiture is. It may not be
precisely Goethe; but it is a magnificent translation of Goethe into
French. Faust, of course, is the Romantic Faust, with his passionate
intimacy with nature. We miss in Berlioz what we get in Schumann, for
example--the close following of Goethe's philosophical plan. Berlioz
is not greatly interested in Faust's schemes for the regeneration of
mankind; his own culture had not brought him into contact with Louis
Blanc and Proudhon and Saint-Simon. But of its kind it is all amazingly
fine. No other Margaret, except Liszt's and perhaps Schumann's, can
compare with Berlioz's for pure pathos--the sensuous simplicity of soul
that wrings the heart with compassion. Altogether, though the opera of
Berlioz deals only with the more primordial passions of the drama, and
ends in a manner rather too suggestive of a Christmas card conceived in
a nightmare, it is more subtle, more profound, than almost any other
work of the same order.
Only one setting surpasses it--that of Schumann; not because it
achieves a finer individual portraiture than Berlioz's work, but
because, on the whole, it stirs us more deeply in precisely the way we
are stirred by Goethe's poem. Schumann's plan is peculiar and original.
Whereas most other composers who have employed the operatic or cantata
form have drawn largely on Goethe's First Part and almost ignored
the Second, it is from the Second Part that two-thirds of Schumann's
work are taken. Out of the First Part we have only the garden scene,
Margaret before the image of the Mater Dolorosa, and the scene in the
cathedral. Faust, therefore, does not so far appear at all, except
in the tiny garden scene; and the sole structural fault of the work
is that something of the earlier Faust should have been shown to us,
before he appears, in the next section, as the refined and vigorous
humanist of Goethe's Second Part. Setting this defect aside, however,
the remainder of the work gives us the quintessence of Goethe's drama.
We have first the scene, at the opening of Goethe's Second Part, where
Ariel and his fellow-spirits sing round the sleeping Faust; then
Faust's return to mental health and energy, and his resolve to devote
himself henceforth to the highest activities of human life. Upon this
scene there follows the visit of the four grey-haired women--Want,
Guilt, Need, and Care--the blinding of Faust by the breath of Care,
the last outburst of his passionate zeal for life and freedom, and
his death. The remainder of the work is devoted to a textual setting,
line for line, of the final scene of Goethe's poem--the hermits, the
choruses of angels, the three women, the penitent (formerly Margaret),
the Mater Gloriosa, and the "Chorus Mysticus."
Schumann's scheme is thus in the highest degree philosophical. It
austerely disregards the conventional elements that enter into the
usual operatic _Faust_, and concentrates itself on the essential
spiritual factors of the poem. Mephistopheles appears only for a moment
in the garden duet, and again in Faust's death-scene, so that there
is no attempt at full portraiture of him. Schumann's Margaret really
suggests the Margaret of Goethe. The same mediæval atmosphere seems to
environ her, both in the garden and in the cathedral. She is naïve in
the scene with Faust as Goethe's Margaret is naïve; and in the scene
where she bends before the Mater Dolorosa, and again when the evil
spirit, in the cathedral, harries her with his taunts, everything is
set in the right key and the right colour. In the portrait of Faust
it is the thinker, the philosopher, that is uppermost throughout.
All through Schumann's Second Part, indeed, we feel this constant
pre-occupation of the musician with the great human elements of the
drama; while in the exquisite, subtilised mysticism of the Third
Part these elements glow with a purer and rarer light. The work is
uneven in its musical inspiration; but on the whole we can say that
Schumann's is the real _German_ Faust, the Faust of Goethe. Writing in
his eightieth year, the old poet pointed out one of the main reasons
for the enduring interest in his work: "The commendation which the work
has received, far and near, may perhaps be owing to this quality--that
it permanently preserves the period of a development of a human soul,
which is tormented by all that afflicts mankind, shaken also by all
that disturbs it, repelled by all that it finds repellent, and made
happy by all that which it desires. The author is at present far
removed from such conditions: the world, likewise, has to some extent
other struggles to undergo: nevertheless, the state of men, in joy and
sorrow, remains very much the same; and the latest born will still
find cause to acquaint himself with what has been enjoyed and suffered
before him, in order to adapt himself to that which awaits him." It is
this grave note, this width of outlook upon man and the world, that we
have in Schumann's work in fuller quantity and richer quality than in
any other setting of _Faust_. His is really the spirit of the _Faust_
conceived by the great poet--full of a passionate reflection upon life,
an uplifted, philosophical sense of tragedy, a mellow sympathy with and
pity for the troubled heart of man. From first to last he has made his
emotions out of the deeper, not out of the more superficial, passions
of the play.